


The Stars Threw Down Their Spears

by dirtybinary



Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: Angst, Hopeful Ending, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-03
Updated: 2014-05-03
Packaged: 2018-01-21 17:50:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1558883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirtybinary/pseuds/dirtybinary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Laurie chooses Andrew, with predictable consequences for Ralph.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Stars Threw Down Their Spears

**Author's Note:**

  * For [havisham](https://archiveofourown.org/users/havisham/gifts).



_My Triumph lasted till the Drums_  
 _Had left the Dead alone_  
 _And then I dropped my Victory_  
 _And chastened stole along_  
 _To where the finished Faces_  
 _Conclusion turned on me_  
 _And then I hated Glory_  
 _And wished myself were They._

  
"Five minutes," Bunny drawled. "You would be surprised, Laurie, at the difference five minutes can make. There's even a little rhyme about it. _For want of a nail…_ you know how it goes, don't you?"

The small knot of mourners was streaming into the chapel, but Bunny, who had sailed into Laurie's path like a fragment of debris from a stricken Spitfire, showed no inclination of removing himself to follow. Laurie had no idea what he was talking about, and knew better than to expect help; Alec had taken one look at him, drawn his lips together in a thin line, and turned away abruptly. Under the circumstances he did not trust himself with long sentences. He said, tightly, "I'm astonished to see you here."

"Likewise," said Bunny. His tone was quite conversational, but his voice rang hollow, as if someone had peeled off a layer of insulating plastic to expose bare wire. "I came to see you."

"Cute," said Laurie. He was attempting, with limited success, to step around Bunny's theatrical Duellist-with-Outflung-Leg pose.

"I know," said Bunny, with a sweet smile. Laurie experienced a sudden sense of imminent doom. "I just had a few questions. For instance: don't you wish you'd stuck around after giving old Ralph the smackdown the other day? If only to see what happened next? I know _I_ did, but then, I was concussed, so I probably wasn't the best person to—"

"Bunny," said a voice at his elbow, "shut up."

Sandy had materialised. Laurie looked up, his nervous system too fatigued to register anything but the vaguest surprise. "Just catching Laurie up on what he's missed," said Bunny, sidling away. "I always thought Ralph had the most self-destructive taste in men."

He detached himself and headed for the chapel. Laurie contemplated the choice of two evils—to follow immediately behind or to linger on the cobblestones with Sandy—and realised that his bone-deep indecision had, in itself, been a choice. "I'm dreadfully sorry about him," Sandy said, reaching for Laurie's arm with an earnest, confiding look. "He was the one who found Ralph, you know."

Pulling his arm away seemed like too much effort. Laurie took a moment to process what he had heard, and said that he hadn't known this.

"Slipped out of sick bay, broken rib and all, and made for Ralph's place. Maybe he realised he'd gone a bit too far, or he just wanted to have the last word. He must have got there just as Ralph was driving off. If he'd only arrived five minutes earlier—well, knowing Ralph, I don't suppose it would have made a difference."

Laurie felt he ought to be offended by the prosaic way in which he said all this, as if it were no more than a morsel of party gossip, but there was something unexpectedly calming in Sandy Reid's utter lack of philosophy. "I don't think I ought to have come," he said. Music was drifting out of the little chapel; the service must be starting. "But—"

"But you felt you had to?" Sandy supplied, gazing at Laurie with unbearable concern.

Laurie nodded mutely. To have missed the funeral would have felt like weaseling out of a punishment well-deserved and duly meted out. _As ye sow, so shall ye reap,_ he thought.

"I suppose Bunny came for the same reason, not that he'd admit it," Sandy said. Laurie bore the inadvertent cruelty of the comparison with no attempt at self-defense. "Well, we mustn't loiter around here, they've started without us."

Laurie allowed himself to be steered to the chapel. Inside it was cool and dim, but one of the stained-glass windows near the front was broken, admitting a violent shaft of daylight into the sanctuary. Heads turned as he entered mid-hymm with Sandy, and beneath the slow march of the piano and the singer's mournful tenor, he heard a quiet murmur go through the hall. He had met most of these people at Alec's birthday party. He had come prepared for their anger and blame, but all he glimpsed in their faces was a kind of tired, blank pity, which seemed altogether harder to bear.

"We can stand right here," said Sandy's gentle voice in his ear, guiding him to a pew.

 

_Soldiers, this solitude  
Through which we go  
Is I._

  
"Say, Spud," said Mervyn, back in the ward. "I'm sorry about your friend and all."

Laurie sat down on the edge of his bed. He was to be discharged tomorrow, Mervyn the day after, and then it would begin: the vast expanse of time that stretched out between now and the start of term, which he would have to navigate alone. Suddenly he felt desperate for the normalcy of small talk, even with this boy who had known Ralph Lanyon only as the nice man who had given him the _East Africa Pilot_. "Thanks," he said. "The funeral was all right. Small and unfussy. I think he would have approved."

Mervyn listened with solemn intent, his hands clasped on his thighs. "I wanted to go, but I wasn't allowed."

"That's all right," said Laurie. "He'll know."

A nurse, clattering by, gave him a curious look. News spread fast through the hospital grapevine. Alec was avoiding him, but Sandy had promised to talk him round. "What will you do now?" Mervyn asked, with a curiously adult diffidence. "After your discharge, I mean?"

"I'm not sure," said Laurie. "There's a friend I need to look up, but that's it."

"A friend?" Mervyn's sharp eyes had narrowed. "You don't mean the same one you snuck out to see the other time?"

Falsehood was beyond him. "That's the one," said Laurie. What the hell, he thought; if he was going to unburden himself to a ten-year-old, he might as well go the whole way. "I didn't manage to see him the other time. There was a misunderstanding, it's complicated, but I can—I should—clear that up now."

"Oh." Impressed by this confidence, Mervyn considered it at length and, fortuitously, did not press him for further detail. After a moment he said, "Spud?"

"Yes?"

"Will you write to me sometime? I haven't any grown-up friends; not yet, at least."

Laurie searched for a smile, and found one more easily than he expected. "You bet I will," he said.

 

_When the stars threw down their spears_  
 _And watered heaven with their tears,_  
 _Did he smile his work to see?_  
 _Did he who made the Lamb make thee?_

  
"In the end, you see," Andrew said, "it wasn't finding out about myself that bothered me most, but realising that you'd seen it all along, and you hadn't told me."

They were standing under a decrepit tree in the yard of The Beeches, under a cloudy, starless sky. ("Cotton wool soaked in violet dye," Andrew had said, smiling, when they met at the door and all of Laurie's clever hellos fled beyond reach.) Laurie had come straight from the hospital after his discharge. After Ralph, after Bunny, the constant terror of _too late_ seemed to have been ingrained onto some primal part of his brain. "I know," he said. "I'm sorry."

He met Andrew's open, rancourless gaze. The resemblance to Ralph, seemingly heightened now by the growing hollows under the cheekbones and the blue-black brands of sleeplessness beneath the eyes, was at once a scourge and a comfort. "You did it to protect me," Andrew said. "I can't imagine what it must have been like for you, all these months. Could you really have gone on like that indefinitely?"

"For you I could," said Laurie at once.

He would have felt silly and juvenile saying this to Ralph. Andrew, like Mervyn, simply seemed to absorb the fierce sentiment behind the words, and understand it for what it was. "Thank you," he said. He shifted his weight, as though uncertain whether to step back from Laurie or close the distance between them, and settled for an abortive sideways movement. "For that, and—for coming to clear up the misunderstanding. That must have been hard for you. Especially as this means it was partly my fault he died."

"Of course it wasn't," said Laurie sharply. This was one of the possibilities he had feared, for which he had not known how to prepare. "Come on, my dear, you can't possibly think—"

"I know what I think," said Andrew. Laurie had already found that he could be abrupt on occasion; the foreknowledge helped him not to recoil. "It's just, people have been telling me all my life what they want me to believe. Don't you suppose I'm past the age when I can let you get away with that?"

He said that last almost teasingly, but Laurie, who had developed a savant's pitch-perfect memory for every single one of Andrew's inflections, recognised the real frustration belying the playful tone. He said again, helplessly, "I'm sorry."

"So am I," said Andrew after a moment's hesitation. "I almost wish, after all that, I'd gotten to meet him properly. The man you loved, not his… friend."

"You wouldn't have liked him," Laurie said. "You're much too alike."

Andrew sighed. "See, you're doing it again."

Laurie clamped his jaw shut. Presently he became aware of Andrew's gentle smile, and let himself breathe again. "What will you do now?" he asked. The words resonated somewhere in his memory; he realised that Mervyn had asked him the same thing in the ward, and with more or less the same tentative hope.

Andrew shrugged, an easy, one-shouldered movement. "Work. Help people. Think. I have a good deal to think about." He paused. "I don't suppose I'll be here long."

Laurie felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. "Are you still planning to do—"

"Ambulance work in the line?" Andrew shook his head. "I was upset when I wrote you that letter. I know why I considered it. Selfless work for a selfish reason, really. No, I think I might get a transfer to a quiet hospital, somewhere in the country, like where we first met… where I don't know anyone. I need to make up my mind about—about things, and I don't want anyone making it up for me. You understand, don't you?"

Laurie nodded, relieved. "Would you mind terribly if I visited sometime?"

"You," said Andrew, "are the exception I was hoping to make. Dave wouldn't approve, but—" He shrugged again. Laurie gathered from this that Dave was one of the people from whom Andrew, without any loss in esteem, wanted to distance himself for the time being. "It would be nice," he said at last.

"It would," said Laurie. He perceived that their time was up; he had made his case, and to loiter now would have come off as desperate. On some impulse he sought for Andrew's hand in the shadows, and squeezed it tight. "Take care of yourself."

"God bless," said Andrew quietly.

There was a kind of lull, a silent anticipation, during which Laurie became aware that Andrew had not taken his hand away. They were so close that he was sure Andrew could hear him breathing; that each of his exhales, steaming out in white waiflike puffs, seemed to drift up on its own accord to caress Andrew's face. He counted two or three puffs before starting to pull away. Andrew said, "Wait."

Laurie turned back, expecting nothing, wanting nothing, content only to have held Andrew's hand in the starless night. "What I feel about you," Andrew began hesitantly, "I haven't a name for it. I don't know yet if it's right or wrong. But it's real, Laurie, and I'm sure of that. So—don't leave me alone too long."

Laurie remembered, at some length, that dazed muteness was not generally an appropriate response to make mid-conversation. He said, "I promise not to," and if his voice had trembled, at least he was sure it was too dark for Andrew to have seen his face.

With this reassurance, he drew the words around him like a coat, and stepped out into the lane.

**Author's Note:**

> The title and epigraphs are from Emily Dickinson's "My Triumph lasted till the Drums", Walter de la Mare's "Napoleon", and William Blake's "The Tyger".


End file.
